Vegas Lights
by amy dunne
Summary: (au) In which Stiles and Lydia wake up in Vegas with hangovers, a few missing articles of clothes, and rings on their fingers.
1. it's all a blur last night

**Title: **Vegas Lights

**Rating: **T

**Word Count:** 1595

**Summary: **(au) In which Stiles and Lydia wake up in Vegas with hangovers, a few missing articles of clothes, and rings on their fingers.

**Main Pairings:** Lydia/Stiles and some Scott/Allison

**Disclaimer: **I do not own _Teen Wolf_ or the chapter title (from _Waking Up In Vegas_ by Katy Perry) or the official title (from _Vegas Lights_ by Panic! At The Disco)

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><p><em>chapter one: it's all a blur last night<em>

The day after Allison Argent's twenty-first birthday, her best friend woke up with a pounding hangover, a dry taste in her mouth, and something heavy draped over her stomach.

It took Lydia Martin a few moments to realize that she wasn't wearing a shirt, and her skirt was riding high on her hips, and a few more moments to realize that the heavy thing draped over her stomach was a lightly muscled arm made of pale skin and scattered moles.

Her half-lidded eyes snapped wide open, and a quick glance to her left told her that _Stiles Stilinski _was in her bed—aka, the guy that had been professing his love to her since they were nine.

Lydia bit her lip to keep from swearing so that she wouldn't wake him up, and shut her eyes. _Think, Lydia: how the hell did you end up in bed with Stiles Stilinski?_

Her mind unhelpfully brought her back to shots of some kind of vodka that tasted like cherries and smelled like nail polish remover, and she let her eyes open again. "Stiles?" She asked softly, hoping that he had had less to drink than she did.

Before she could shake his bare shoulder to rouse him, she saw smears of pink at the corner of lips, throat, and jaw, and the recognition of her own lipstick was enough to coax her into stumbling out of bed, sliding her tank top back on, and exiting the room in some combination of tip-toeing and running.

She crossed a window, and saw a hickey on her throat. _I cheated on Jackson. I'm a cheater now. I _cheated_ on the love of my life._

She cheated on the guy that she had been dating since her first month of college, possibly the first person she ever fell in love with. Hell, Lydia didn't even _like_ Stiles—she knew him well, and knew that he loved her.

She knew that in his senior year, he broke up with his girlfriend when he found out that Lydia was going to prom alone so that he could take her. She knew that when she was sick, he sacrificed his own grades to attend her classes and take the notes so he could teach her and make her soup.

She _also_ knew that Jackson hated Stiles, and that he was probably the last person that Jackson would have wanted his girlfriend to sleep with (though literally speaking, Jackson wouldn't have _wanted_ his girlfriend sleeping with anyone but him). Jackson wouldn't really care that in Lydia's case, sleeping with Stiles was literally _sleeping_ in a bed with Stiles.

God, she was screwed.

* * *

><p>"I didn't <em>sleep<em> with him." Lydia repeated for the third time to her wide-eyed best friend, a best friend who didn't seem to believe a word that Lydia said.

"Uh-huh," Allison nodded, a smile spreading across her lips. "You just let him attack your throat." She laughed as Lydia scrambled to untie her wraparound braid and pull the hair forward and around her neck.

"_Allison,_" Lydia hissed, tensing when she saw Scott approach the two. "We're done talking about this."

"Have you guys seen Stiles?" Scott asked, and then looked to Lydia in a way that made her squirm. "Last time I saw him, he was with you."

"Doing what?" Lydia asked harshly, and both Scott and Allison looked surprise by her near-aggressive words. "I mean, what were Stiles and I doing? I had a bit much to drink." She covered casually.

"I don't really know. You guys were both laughing, and you were clinging onto his arm and heading into a jewelry shop." Scott glanced towards Lydia's hand, "Hey, nice ring."

"This isn't mine," Lydia commented, pulling the ring off of her slender finger. She dully noted that it was on her left ring finger, "I've never seen this before. Maybe I found it while I was drunk and decided to put it on."

"Or," Allison grabbed Lydia's wrist, and started walking her to the jewelry store that her boyfriend had pointed to, "Maybe you bought it. Scott just said you went to a jewelry store, remember? How many brain cells did you lose?" She teased.

Lydia looked at her dryly, the hangover souring her mood. "Drinking doesn't affect your brain that way. It damages the part of your mind responsible for bringing memory: the hippocampus, also the reason why I can't _remember_ most of last night."

"Hey, excuse me?" Allison called, more of a command than a question. The cashier looked up in slight alarm at Allison with Lydia in a tow, "Do you recognize this girl? Or this ring?" Allison held up the hand of Lydia's that she was dragging her by and waved it slightly so that the cashier could try to identify the ring.

"Allison, he doesn't—"

"You came in with your boyfriend last night, if I remember correctly." He stated, and Lydia nodded in agreement so that he'd keep going. "It's part of our true love collection, _extremely_ popular. Your boyfriend bought the matching band."

_Is that why I nearly slept with Stiles? He decided to buy me jewelry, and I turned into a brainless zombie that'll give out with the snap of a finger? _

"...supposed to bring luck to a married couple." Lydia focused back on the cashier, blinking at him.

"Why would Stiles buy that for me?" Lydia asked quietly, looking to Allison for answers. Before her best friend or the cashier could reply, Lydia was running through the casino, only one thought clear in her mind: _I need to find Stiles where is Stiles is Stiles awake how much did he drink how much did he remember oh my God did I try to marry my not-boyfriend in Las freaking Vegas where is Stiles?_

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><p>Stiles' face felt sticky, like there was something written on crayon over his lips. Grimacing, he brought a hand to his mouth and tried to wipe the substance away, and then paused when his hand came back with a streak of pink.<p>

_That's Lydia's lipstick color. It matched her high heels. She was only a few inches shorter than me last night._ He scrambled out of bed (which, for him, meant he flung himself up, got himself tangled in the sheets, and collapsed on the floor) to find a mirror, and he stared at himself.

He wasn't wearing a shirt, and there were more marks on his neck, this time purple. _That isn't Lydia's lipstick. She doesn't wear purple lipstick. _How much he knew about her didn't quite phase him, and he tried to ignore his disappointment over the sign that his neck was attacked with not-Lydia's lipstick.

The lipstick wasn't coming off, and when he looked closer, they were in bruise-colored ovals. _Did maybe Lydia Martin attack my neck?_ He rubbed at the mark—most definitely a hickey—and turned on the faucet so that he could splash his face with water and rub at the lipstick marks. _  
><em>

He could taste stale vodka in his mouth and winced, wondering exactly how much he had to drink.

He held his left hand to his ear and snapped, then winced at the sound. _Yup. Definitely drank too much. _He slipped his hand into the pocket of his jeans, and then paused when his hand got snagged on something.

Or, less of his hand, and more of a silver wedding band that encircled his left ring finger.

"Shit shit shit shit _shit_," Stiles swore, running his hands through his hair in a display of confusion because he's pretty sure that he married Lydia Martin (or at least tried to).

And now, the girl he's in love with is going to hate him.

He stumbled around the small motel room, even less coordinated than usual due to the fact that he _might_ have married Lydia freaking Martin, and his parents are going to kill him when he gets home. _"Hey Dad, how've you been? Yeah, Allison's birthday was fun. Oh, and remember that girl I had a crush on? Yeah. We're married and she has a boyfriend." _

He paused to assess his situation, and tried his best to think. His golden-brown eyes landed on a white sheet of paper on the bedside table, and he frowned. _Maybe Lydia left a note?_ He turned it over to assess the writing, both fearing for and praying that Lydia knew more about their night than he did.

At that moment, the door started to swing open, and then stopped abruptly due to the chain that Stiles had latched the door with. "Stiles," Lydia said, her breathing heavy. "Let me in, please. I need to talk to you." She had never spoken to Stiles in such a desperate way, but Stiles could hardly hear her.

Both his and Lydia's names were printed in drunken handwriting on an official marriage certificate, completely filled out and _legal_, not some half-assed scam by some Vegas conman promising to marry two idiotic lovebirds.

"I'm—you're—I'm married to you."

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><p><strong>AN: **This is super short, probably half of the length of the rest of the chapters. I kind of wanted to give a setting and an introduction to how old they are and where their relationships are with each other.

If any of this is confusing, ask a question in the reviews, or message me on tumblr (link in bio) for the most immediate response. The relationship between the characters and the full setting will grow next chapter when they formally meet.


	2. where villains spend the weekend

**A/N: **Here's the next chapter, and it's an awkwardly fast update okay don't judge me. I wrote a lot of this today, and now my fingers feel like they're going to fall off but side issues okay. This isn't important just read the note at the bottom that's important okay.

Thank you to **Guest** (I'm crying at the mental image of Jackson/Scott), **Amanda**, **Guest **(You referenced two songs in one sentence ily okay), **tobestardust** (your review was so em-portant to me ily bby), **JacqueSherlock**, **air of withering sweetness**, and **paperworlds **(Nina no foursomes save it for our Steve/Bucky/Sam/Dean/Cas/Osric/basically everyone collab)

**Disclaimer: **I do not own _Teen Wolf_ or the official title (from _Vegas Lights_ by Panic! At The Disco)

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><p><em>chapter two: where villains spend the weekend<em>

.

The flight back to Rhode Island is quiet, and the silence is making Lydia Martin itch. She wants to say something—they all do—but any conversation starter would seem bizarre. _"I have so much homework to catch up on," _Would be pointless. After she got into Brown University, she quit trying to hide the fact that she was a genius, and her friends knew she was done with most of the homework for the year already. _"So, about Stiles and I being married..." _Would be inappropriate. She could see adults around them looking at the two in obvious disgust, and there wasn't much left to say.

She was married to Stiles, and it was completely legal and signed. Scott and Allison knew already, but the rest of their friends didn't—_Jackson_ didn't.

Her mind didn't dare to wander towards her mom's reaction towards the wedding. Her mom met Stiles once, while they were both in high school. Stiles had said something about how beautiful Lydia looked, and instead of swelling with motherly pride, she accused Stiles of trying to steal Lydia from Aiden. Instead of bothering to tell her mom that she liked hooking up with Aiden more than Aiden himself, she told her mom that Stiles was gay.

Her mom bought it, and with the sharp memory that she had, there was no getting out of the _"Lydia Martin do _not_ tell me that you did not only marry someone in Vegas, but it was a guy with no sexual alignment towards you whatsoever?"_ conversation that she could nearly feel.

After close to an hour and a half, Allison spoke up. "They have the movie _What Happens In Vegas,_" Allison commented, squirming at the cold look her best friend treated her with, "I mean, it has Ashton Kutcher in it. You said he was your eighth-favorite actor."

"He got moved to ninth," Lydia replied smoothly, picking up her headphones and turning the TV connected to the back of the chair on, "He's still cute, though." Allison gave her an encouraging nod, and Lydia plugged her headphones in and tried to let herself become absorbed by the movie.

It was an _extremely_ cliché movie where two met in Las Vegas, got drunk, and married each other under intoxication. Then, Ashton (Lydia couldn't remember the names of the characters) played a slot machine game with Cameron Diaz's coin and wins three million dollars. They both wanted the money, and they were forced by a judge to stay married and loyal to each other for six months before they divorced so they would be able to divvy the money easily. They tried to make the other cheat so that they would win the money, but in the end, Cameron and Ashton fell in love.

"I guess Stiles and I missed out on the three million dollar jackpot of getting married in Vegas." Lydia murmured, and the half-asleep Stiles across the aisle from her looked up at the mention of his name. Lydia shook her head dismissively, and he let his eyes close and his head fall back onto his pillow.

She forgot to take her eyes off of him, and watched as he swallowed, Adam's Apple bobbing with the movement. _I should see if I can call Jackson._ She thought, then frowned. _Did seeing an Adam's Apple bob really remind me of my boyfriend?_

Her eyes wandered slightly south of the bulge in his throat to the hickey she left, and she tore her gaze away.

"Excuse me?" Lydia flagged down a flight attendant, and smiled sweetly. "Do you know where the nearest phone is? I need to make a call to my boyfriend."

"We have a telephone in first class, but you aren't seated there, and therefore aren't permitted to take advantage of its facilities." She droned in an expressionless tone, and Lydia tried to keep her smile on.

"Yes, but it won't be a long call. And this flight is going to go on for another three hours, yes? I'm sure the phone won't be occupied for all of those 180 minutes. And if someone comes up behind me in line to use the phone, I'll drop the phone like it's on fire."

"Is your boyfriend going to cheat on you if you don't call him every ten minutes?"

Lydia visibly flinched at the mention of cheating, and sat back in her seat instead of responding. _No, I think that I'm the cheater in this relationship._

The flight attendant seemed to soften slightly at Lydia's face, obviously assuming that her boyfriend actually _was _cheating her, and licked her lips. "The wifi password is $10. You could message him on Facebook."

"No, that's okay. I'll talk to him in person." Lydia said smoothly, and the flight attendant nodded and looked past Lydia to Scott and Allison.

She—Lydia read that her name was Cindy, which seemed fitting—cleared her throat about four times to get the couple's attention. After a moment, Scott untangled his fingers from Allison's hair (he was trying to learn how to braid), and gave the flight attendant a cheeky smile. "Hi! I'm Scott." He introduced himself.

Allison laughed at Scott's overly-excited introduction, and even Lydia had to crack a smile. Cindy narrowed her eyes in confusion, "Do you want a drink, Scott?"

"No, I'm good. But a glass of wine for Allison? She turned 21 two days ago, and it's legal. Right?" Scott asked, and continued before Cindy could confirm or deny his suspicions. "I mean, in Europe the little kids drink wine. But in the sky, the law could be different. Is the drinking age different?"

"Allison's fine, Scott." Lydia looked at him pointedly, "It changes from country to country, but in many countries, you can drink so long as a parent provides it to you. The Europeans don't abuse alcohol nearly as much as we do." Her thoughtless words of abusing alcohol brought her back to her hazy night with Stiles, and she made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat.

"I'll bring your friend a white wine." Cindy said after a moment of watching the friends banter, then tapped the half-asleep Stiles on the shoulder. "Sir? Would—"

"I'm not really a _sir_, per say. I'm Stiles." He introduced, and Allison let out a short laugh at the similarities between the best friends.

"Your little gang seems to be very friendly." She said, sounding more bored than complimentary. "Would you like something to drink?"

"Um, apple juice." Stiles said, and Lydia tried to hold her smile at the childish order. Cindy reached under her cart and pulled out a plastic cup, and filled it with Stiles' drink of choice.

"Are you sure you don't want that in a sippy cup?" Lydia asked, an eyebrow raised in a fashion that took about a month of practicing with a mirror to master.

"I never really liked those. They made whatever I was tasting smell like plastic." Stiles said, completely serious.

Lydia smiled, and looked down at her phone. _Should I ask for wifi? I should check to see if my professors emailed me. _She turned the idea down, and instead scrolled through her pictures to find one of Allison and her sitting in a toy airplane on a playground that made them look gigantic. It seemed like it would be funny (seeing as they were on an airplane), but coming across pictures of a significant blonde boy stunned her into dropping her phone into her lap.

"Something wrong?" Allison asked, reaching over to pick up Lydia's phone.

"Yeah, no. Fine." Lydia almost cringed at the contradicting phrases that tumbled out of her mouth, "I just keep reminding myself of Jackson."

"Did you tell him already?" Allison asked, turning fully to her best friend. "Over a phone call? You told your boyfriend of three years that you got _married_ over a _phone call_?"

Lydia cringed—Allison could be loud without knowing, and more than a few people turned to look at the spectacle.

"You told Jackson that you're married to someone he hates over a phone call?" Allison's even-louder boyfriend asked, and Lydia fought the urge to bang her head into the seat in front of hers.

Stiles' mouth opened, and before a word could tumble through his lips, Lydia cut him off. "No! Jackson doesn't know, and _none_ of you are going to tell him until I get home, and get a chance to. Got it?"

"How are you planning on telling him? Do you have a conversation planned out?" Scott leaned over Allison to make eye contact with the annoyed strawberry blonde.

"No, of course not. I haven't given a second of thought as to how I'm going to tell the guy I'm in love with that I'm married."

"Are you sure that's going to go over well? What if you can't—"

"I was _joking_, Scott. Of course I've thought about it. I've scripted a dozen conversations in my head, and I've thought of fifteen different scenarios about how he'll react, and what I'll say to soothe him. I can handle this, Scott. You don't need to worry about how I'm going to tell my boyfriend that I'm married."

"Maybe he won't be heartbroken," Stiles imputed, and Lydia looked at him incredulously. "I mean, Jackson's a douchebag. Maybe he was cheating on you. Or looking for a way to break-up with you. Maybe he was praying to Jesus that you and I would get married in Las Vegas, because he's always secretly thought that you and I would make a perfect combination. Hey, maybe he'll be _happy_. I'm not making this better, am I?"

Lydia shook her head, and shut him up before he could try to make her feel better. "I need to go to the bathroom."

After a few near-spills on the way to the bathroom—walking on a plane was hard _without_ three-inch heels—she stumbled into the thankfully unoccupied stall, and locked the door.

She didn't quite realize how quickly she was breathing until she looked in the mirror, and winced.

_Calm down, Lydia. It isn't like Jackson's been looking for an excuse to break up with you. He isn't that sensitive. He'd break up with me if he wanted to. But he doesn't. Except he might considering that my name is legally Lydia Stilinski._

A knock came at the door, and Lydia stamped her heel in frustration. "Can you read English? This is a flight from _Las Vegas_ to _Rhode Island_, not Thailand to France. It clearly says occu—"

"Lydia, can I come in?"

"It's about one square foot wide in here, but why not?" She asked sarcastically—thinking of Jackson _really_ darkened her moon—and watched as the honey-eyed boy shuffled in. He seemed to be standing as far away from her as possible so he wouldn't upset her.

"Are you okay?" Stiles asked quietly.

"I'm perfect, Stiles. Do you always barge into the bathroom while girls are trying to use it, or just on Tuesdays?"

"Does seeing pictures of Jackson always make you need to pee?" Stiles fired back, and in spite of the fact that she would probably be single in four hours, and she was in an airplane bathroom stall with Stiles, she cracked a smile.

It didn't last for long, but her brief smile illuminated Stiles' face, and he looked like a kid that had just been handed ice cream. She turned away from him, and looked at her reflection, "What do you think he's going to say?" She moved her hair to cover the hickeys on her throat for roughly the twentieth time that day.

"I think you should pay less attention to Jackson."

"Oh?"

"I think that you should worry about the fact that you have a _husband_, and try to remember that your life doesn't revolve around some guy. You should be looking through quick and painless ways to divorce me. Not pretending that you aren't a freaking _genius_, and wasting your intelligence by spending 95% of your brain worrying about Jackson." Stiles said, and the look in his eyes was close to anger, but more annoyance than that.

Lydia looked to him coolly, "Jackson isn't _some guy_. He's the love of my life. Someday, we'll get married, move to England or Spain or France, and have three kids. My future is built around him, and losing him over a drunken marriage in Las Vegas isn't part of the plan." She decided not to add that it was impossible to use more than 10% of your brain, and decided that wedging the door open and slipping out would be more productive.

"You love this country." Stiles said quietly, and his words were strange enough for Lydia to pause in her leaving. "When you were in seventh grade, I asked you if you were going to go to some fancy college in Europe, and you laughed at me. You told me about how fascinating this country and its technology was, and even though I didn't understand most of what you were telling me, I understood enough to know that you want to stay here.

"I know that it's important for you to follow your boyfriend, but it's more important for him to follow _you_. You're better than that, Lydia. You're a genius, and you'll advance whatever country that you choose to stay in. You're going to figure out some theorem or the missing link between humans and monkeys or discover a cure to some disease. But you aren't going to do that if you don't put yourself first."

Stiles' speech was startling, to say the least. For a moment, Lydia felt too heavy to move because _how did Stiles Stilinski, the boy that fell down an upwards escalator for about three minutes, say something so eloquent?_ and the fact that he remembered a meaningless conversation from seventh grade was shaking.

She all but ran back to her seat.

* * *

><p>.<p>

"What's wrong, Lyd?"

Lydia Martin had not been at the apartment that she and Jackson shared for thirty seconds before he spun her in his arms, and laid his lips on her thick ones. She was panicking a bit too severely to kiss him back like a normal human being, and it quickly killed the mood.

"Nothing." The automatic female reaction after being asked 'what's wrong' came through her lips, and she shook her head. "I mean, a lot is wrong. More specifically, everything. I'm pretty sure that _nothing _is right."

"You've lost me." Jackson said, and Lydia felt like she was going to cry, but she hated feeling or acting like she was helpless, and needed a Prince Charming.

"I've made a _huge_ mistake, Jackson." Lydia said, her voice shaking with the pressure of holding back her emotions. She tried to take in more air so that she could explain as quickly and as painlessly as possible, but the gasp of air turned into a choking sob, and Jackson grabbed her shoulders.

"Lydia, try and breathe. Whatever this is, we can get over it. Okay?" He asked, and she shook her head.

Jackson tried to be gentle with her—in this state, she was as breakable as glass, and pushed away some of the now-wet hair that was plastered to her face. His eyes flickered down to the marks on her throat, and his jaw twitched. "Ly—"

"Jackson, I didn't mean to. I was so drunk because Scott and Allison and Stiles were drunk and I drank with them, and you know I can't hold as much alcohol as them because I'm smaller and they have—"

"You slept with someone?" He asked coldly, and she almost violently shook her head.

"No, no, no, no. Nothing farther than kissing. I mean nothing below the neck." She said quickly, and Jackson seemed to relax slightly. She cringed, completely forgetting her mental scripts, and nearly babbled the rest of the story. "I can't remember any of it but I was with Stiles and—"

"_Stiles_?" Jackson asked, and again, his mood soured. "Don't tell me you hooked up with _him_."

"No, I didn't—I mean, I did. But I did worse than that and please don't interrupt me. Please." Lydia said scatteredly, and refused to continue until her boyfriend nodded. "For some reason, we went into a jewelry store, and we bought these rings, and then we went to some guy and he had us sign the certificate and officiated us and we said yes and I'm _so_ sorry, Jackson."

She paid no attention to the fact that it was the most illiterate thing she had said (while sober) in about fifteen years. "Jackson?" She whispered, blinking up at him. "Jackson, please say something."

He remained silent, and the silence was more painful than him hitting her would have been (not that he would have). "Say something, _anything_, please Jackson. I love you, I love you. Please. You have every right to hate me. I hate me. Please, talk to me, _please_. 'Whatever this is, we can get over it', right? It's been three years, and I've never been unfaithful to you."

He turned away from her, and she followed him as he moved into her room. "Ja—"

"Lydia, I want you to get out." Lydia blinked—she wasn't expecting him to _kick her out_—and lightly touched his arm. He wrenched his arm away as though her hands were on fire, and she squeezed her eyes shut to block another dam of tears.

"You're kicking me out of our house?" Lydia asked, now more stunned than upset. "Jackson, where am I going to live?"

His eyes wandered down to her ring, and he scowled. "Stilinski's been _pathetically _in love with you for twelve years, and I'm sure that he's opening a champagne bottle right now because he's finally got you. Go live with your husband."

"Jackson, he isn't in love with me. He's just attached to the idea that he loves me, because he's never met a girl worth loving before." The self detrimental words poured out of her mouth before she could think about them, and Lydia frowned at them. "He doesn't understand love. I _do_, Jackson—I'm in love with you, and I haven't stopped just because I got drunk in the worst place to be drunk."

"Right now, he's all you have, isn't he?" Jackson asked, and the cold rage on his face terrified Lydia. "I haven't stopped loving you either, but I don't want to be in love with a married woman. All of our college life has been spent together, and I think we should see different people."

"Jackson, no—I don't want to be like Ross and Rachel and get confused and break each others hearts over and over for _years_—"

"And I don't want to keep watching Ross and Rachel chase each other. I don't want to watch _The Notebook_ every Sunday night. But I don't want to take a break." Jackson said, and for a moment, Lydia smiled.

"I want to break up." He finished, his eyes turning into stone. "Lydia, I can't be around you right now. And if you've ever loved me—if all of this wasn't a _game_ to you, you'll give me space."

"I love you, Jackson." Lydia said automatically, and she sounded so _needy_, but with her heart in the state that it currently was in, it was hard to be anything but completely pathetic.

"Then, please leave."

* * *

><p>.<p>

Stiles was on the phone with his best friend, on the verge of breaking down into hysterical happiness and anger and sadness because of Lydia Freaking Martin.

"Stiles, this isn't all bad. Maybe she'll see you in a different way. Maybe she'll actually fall in love with you." Scott said optimistically, and Stiles groaned.

"Yeah, because she hasn't had _plenty_ of chances to do that for the last decade." _More like last twelve years and four months and roughly ten days._

"Even her best friend thinks you two are perfect. She's really smart—I can't even understand half of what she says when she's explaining a class—and you're pretty smart. Jackson isn't. You guys already have a lot in common."

"Scott, I don't even know if she's with Jackson. He might not break up with her." Stiles said, running a hand through his hair in frustration. "He'd have to be completely fucking _insane_ to break up with a girl like Lydia."

"Wow. Might want to tone down that language. Babies come after marriage—you don't want your vocabulary to be 80% curses before the kid comes out."

"Scott!" Stiles snapped, growing more agitated by the minute. "This isn't _funny_. She probably hates me."

"Why would Lydia hate you?" Scott asked, obviously not having thought it through as much as his friend had.

"Why wouldn't she? Either I broke up her relationship, or Jackson told her to divorce me and never speak to me again. And I don't blame him! I don't care if he's a complete, utter douchebag. Like, the worst of the douchebags. I mean, _such_ a douchebag. If all the douches got together, and nominated a douchebag king, Jackson would lose because he is such a douchebag that all the other douchebags don't want him to be the king of _anything_! Even douchebags!" Stiles ranted, tongue getting tied by saying the word 'douchebag' so many times.

"And maybe Lydia realized that! Maybe she doesn't want to date the king of douchebags! Maybe Lydia wants the guy that now holds the world record for saying 'douchebag' the most times in one breath." Scott said, but his enthusiasm wasn't rubbing off on Stiles.

"Lydia. Doesn't. Like. Me." Stiles groaned. "She wouldn't—"

"Hey, quiet down for a minute." Scott commanded, and Stiles went silent as per request as the sound of a door slamming came from Scott's end, along with footsteps. The door opened, and it sounded like Scott was opening it this time, then it banged shut again.

"What was that?"

"Allison just left muttering something about jerks." Scott said, and Stiles glanced at the clock that read 12:04. "Do you know what this means?"

"That your girlfriend just marched out onto sketchy streets past midnight?" Stiles offered.

"No, it means that Lydia called Allison, and Allison thinks _someone_ is a jerk. And I'm guessing that she wasn't talking about Lydia." Scott said, inappropriately excited over the fact that one of his friends just got dumped.

"Is Lydia okay? Did Jackson do something to her? Oh my God, did Jackson hit her? Jackson wouldn't have hurt her, right?"

"Dude, calm down. If Jackson hit Lydia, Allison would've brought my baseball bat with her. And probably would've gone to the garage to get her crossbow." A pause came from Scott, "Do you think she brought her crossbow?"

"I don't know if she brought her crossbow." Stiles said blandly, his mind elsewhere. _Is Lydia okay? _

"I know you don't _know_, but do you think so?" Scott asked, and Stiles shook his head. "Are you shaking your head?" He nodded. "You know I can't hear you when you shake your head."

"Sorry, I'll—" Stiles planned on saying _'work on it_', but a knocking on his door interrupted him. "—call you back."

Stiles hung up the phone, opening his door to let the distressed Argent in, and coax her into not killing Jackson.

Before he could think up a reason as to why Allison would come to his door after her best friend had her heart broken, he opened the door to the polar opposite of an angry Allison.

He had little time to register who had entered his doorway before she threw herself at him in a mess of tears and streaked masrara and tangled hair that smelled like vanilla. _That's it. I'm dreaming. Or dead. I passed out or died and now I'm dreaming or in heaven and Lydia Martin is in my arms and holy shit why is she shivering?_

After a few moments of being stunned, he realized that Lydia wasn't quite _in_ his arms, and more pressing her face into his chest as she cried in an awkward, armless hug. Slowly, he lifted his arms and brought them around her, and if anything, she cried harder.

"Stiles?" _Yup. I'm dreaming. Lydia is in my house after midnight in my arms and saying my name. Or maybe dead. That still isn't out of the question._

"Yeah?" He asked, dumbly thinking he was dreaming—how could he not be? She was looking up at him now, looking stunning even as she cried, and watching him with wide, glassy eyes. He had trouble getting over just how _green_ they were—to him, they were like summer and happiness and healthy grass and everything else that could possibly make him feel weak in a single shade.

Lydia Martin always seemed to have that effect on him.

"Can I stay with you?"

.

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><p><strong>AN: **Hi I feel so bad for Lydia and Jackson isn't that much of a jerk, he's just acting like one because his girlfriend is married to someone he isn't the most fond of. But I have a huge question okay here it goes.

**Should this **or **should this not **be a supernatural au? I'm still not sure as to whether or not to make this all-human or to add in werewolves. So, instead of leaving a poll in my profile or something, can you tell me in the reviews? If you don't want to say anything else, you can just say 'human' or 'supernatural'.

Thank you to everyone who reviewed/favorited/followed again, and I'll update soon!


	3. stayed awake and stared at you

**A/N: **Five months later, I finally update because I'm a _fantastic _updater. And, I almost finished this a while ago and hit the back button and everything went away because I was using the copy/paste method instead of using Drive or Word like a normal person.

Beta read by the fabulous tobestardust aka em aka the most em-portant person in the whole freaking world.

Thank you to **imashuckingwolf0728, Guest/Ariane **(I actually find my plot kind of cliche, but I really love cliche love stories, and really? Haha, I haven't read that, you should link me!)**, **

**LetTheWindTakeYou, miizx3ela, Guest, Guest, Guest, BlackWolfe, RomanticTerror **(I feel the same—I'm absolutely in love with Jackson and Colton Haynes, but I chose more of a jerk-ish approach because I couldn't find a nice way to have him kick her out)**, Carlito1988, FindMeInTheDark, kaisha, Ariee, malia tate **(thank you thank you ilyxx)**, Nic, Nic, Nicole **(Haha, guessing you three are the same person? :))**, **and **amber **for the reviews! And thank you to every favorite/follow/read, here's the next installment!

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Teen Wolf or the song title in which the chapter name was taken from "Something I Need" by OneRepublic.

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><p>Lydia couldn't sleep.<p>

She had no reason to be alert—Stiles had given her water and extra blankets and his bed without her even asking, and she quietly accepted to all. If she was in a normal mood, she would have posed some argument to him about how she wasn't some damsel in distress, and she didn't need to be treated as such, but she was tired, and more than a little heartbroken.

She thought about texting Jackson, but that would make her weak, and she didn't want to feel weak. All throughout high school, she had let boys chase after her, and she would pretend to ignore them and their pining. It was a fun game, and it made her feel desired, but the habit of letting boys chase her had stuck.

_I'm pathetic. I'm thinking of chasing boys while I'm married to the boy that's been chasing me since we were little kids._

Lydia didn't know why she had let Stiles chase her for so long, but more than that, she didn't know why he hadn't given up on her already. In all reality, she was a complete screw up, and the only thing she had going for her was the chance at getting a MacArthur Fellows Genius Grant. Other than a genius mind and a fairly pretty face, she had nothing to show for herself, and nothing for boys to chase her over.

But Stiles hadn't stopped—as far as Lydia was concerned, he had never had a proper girlfriend, let alone romantic feelings towards anyone other than herself. She was pushed towards him often, and even her best friend thought that Stiles' crush on her was adorable, and she should "Give him a chance. You should try everything once." (Lydia had retorted with suggesting for Allison to try the bottle of hot peppers in her cupboard, and the subject was dropped.)

And it was true, in all honestly, that Lydia should've given Stiles a chance—it would've surely changed his mind about her—but she was stuck on the fact that he wasn't her type. In her eyes, boys with beautiful exteriors and slightly asshole-ish personalities were her type, and she clung onto them like the way rain clung to windowshields.

And then, she started crying for the third time that night (though technically it was the next day), and wrapped the covers more tightly around her body. They felt nothing like a romantic embrace, and were annoyingly inhuman to the touch. She pouted her bottom lip out, and glanced around the room. "Stiles?"

At her command, the door swung open, and 150-something pounds of awkward male fell through her door. She had a suspicion that he had heard her crying, and pressed his ear to the door to try and figure out why she was upset.

In a normal mood, she would've snapped at him for eavesdropping, but she was in no mood to turn down human companionship. "Sit," she said, patting a space on the bed.

Stiles scrambled to his feet, and ran to Lydia's side, sitting in the exact spot she had touched. "Hey."

"Hey," She echoed, and for a moment, she wondered if it was a bad idea to invite him in when she had no need for anything. A moment of silence fell over them, and she looked to Stiles, half-expecting for him to make some awkward excuse and leave her room.

"Do you want to play a game?" He asked, and she looked at him quizzically. "I have Monopoly, and Uno, and Life. And video games, too, but they're mostly based on zombies and stuff. Or we can play charades."

Lydia laughed—it was so strange, to be in front of a boy in such a vulnerable state without said boy trying to get into her pants. She could count half a dozen times that she had gone to boys in times of heartbreak, and they simply coaxed her into doing something that she would most definitely regret the next morning.

But Stiles? He was so different, it was hilarious to her. The girl he had a crush on was so, crushingly vulnerable in front of him, and instead of taking advantage of her, he offered to play _charades_ with her. Even now, he was looking at her questioningly, but the question wasn't why she was randomly laughing, but more of 'What game do you want to play?'

Eventually, she dried the wetness from under her eyes with her sleeves, and looked up at him. "I like Life. Can I be the purple car?"

He smiled hugely, and did a half-walk, half-run for the board game. When he got to her door, he stopped, and turned around. "I, uh, know that you usually eat healthy food and no carbs and stuff, but do you want cookies? I baked them when we got back because I was bored, and I washed my hands and stuff and there aren't any germs on them. Or I can get you a celery stick."

"Cookies are fine." Lydia noticed that he had a tendency to ramble a lot around her—it was similar to how he was in high school, and he had no clue what gift to get her for Valentine's Day, so he 'anonymously' bought her five pounds of assorted kinds of chocolates and candy. She guessed it was him in instants, but she decided against telling him that.

After about three minutes (she was fairly certain he was running), he was back in her room, armed with a tray of cookies and a fairly new board game. He placed the game next to her, then crawled into her bed, a few inches from the other side of the board game. "So, here's cookies. Do you know how to play?"

"Of course I do," Lydia said smoothly, and spread out the board games. Stiles stuffed three cookies into his mouth at once, and she suspected it was a trick he picked up on from Scott.

They started the game, and like in real life, they both went to college. Stiles drew his card, and started arguing with her that you weren't supposed to show the other player your career cards and home cards.

"How do I know you aren't cheating? What if you pay yourself $100,000 on pay day and you're just an accountant?"

"This is Life, Lydia! You can't go around assuming the worst in people!"

"You also can't pay someone double what they deserve because they claim to be a doctor." Lydia plucked the card from his hands, and after an indignant noise from his end, she handed the Teacher card back to him.

"I wasn't planning on it. It's your turn to spin." Stiles pointed at the board, and Lydia did as told, forgetting about the marriage and Jackson for a minute. When Stiles calmed down, and argued with her rather than rambled on, he was amusing to talk to, albeit a bit frustrating. He was nearly as stubborn as her—he wasn't stupid, and she assumed that people who were (or thought they were) intelligent were more adamant on being right.

Lydia spun, drew a card, and playfully wiggled it at him. "I'm a doctor." He made a sarcastic comment about how the game predicted out your actual life, and she argued back that she had a good chance of becoming a doctor if she so desired.

They played more, and as before, they argued about the rules. Lydia was fairly certain that she was right about most of them, and in the end, she won by a landslide. He complained about the game being rigged (seeing as he ended up with debt), and they settled with playing Egyptian Ratscrew.

It was a bit more difficult to play with only two people, and on Stiles' end, it was more awkward. Every time they both recognized a good card and slapped it, their hands touched, and he pulled away quickly with an extremely red face.

After Stiles lost three times in a row, he willed himself to pay more attention to the game, and a bit less to how soft her hands were, and how she didn't look like she was about to start crying at each given moment.

"Maybe we can change the rules. Like no sandwiches." Every time a card came up, a different one, and then the same as the first (hence the name sandwich), he completely missed it, and she claimed the stack.

"We can't change the original rules," Lydia countered. "But we can add additional rules. Like... every time a six, and then a nine comes up, we can slap it. It seems like you and Scott practiced spotting dirty jokes in everything possible while we were in high school."

"I reject that." Stiles crossed his arms over his chest, and gave her a pointed look. She easily rivaled it.

"_On a scale of one to one hundred, how cool am I?_" Lydia mimicked in a voice that he assumed was her Scott impression. "God, Scott's lucky that Allison didn't know him while he was in high school."

"I'm sure she'd still be in love with him, teenage stupidity and all." Both Stiles and Lydia, barely 21, didn't have much right to mock what they were three years ago (and what they acted like currently), but talking about the past was easier than talking about the present. Neither of them really knew how to appropriately approach the subject, and even though it had been less than a day since they found out, they were good at pretending it didn't exist.

"I guess so," Lydia shrugged, "I mean, I knew you guys back then, but I'm still in Scott's Pack."

In their sophomore year of college, before Allison and Scott started officially dating, they wandered into the woods after watching Twilight for the first time to see where Scott had parked his car. He, in all his dim logic, had insisted on parking it in an ungodly place in the woods rather than inside the theater to save a few bucks, but when midnight came, they still hadn't found his car.

So instead, they broke out the movie snacks that Stiles had hidden in his pockets, sat on a grassy patch, and made fun of just how ridiculous the movie was. Scott had defended Taylor Lautner and his character to no end, and when the full moon shone over them, Scott had said something sentimental about how he was glad he had his own pack of amazing people (Scott was always more mushy when he was tired). They made fun of him for it the next day, but the nickname for their group stuck.

"Not really," Stiles argued. "You basically ignored Scott and I back then, and hung out with Danny and Cora and the really stupid people."

"They made my brain burn." Lydia grinned, but it was more fond than rude. "They weren't stupid, really, they just 'couldn't give two shits about school', as Danny put it."

"He was quite eloquent." Stiles put a nine down on top of Lydia's six, and promptly slapped it with a proud noise. Lydia pushed the cards over to him, and his childish smile only widened.

They played like this for a while longer, and when they changed games to Blackjack, Lydia fell asleep right before Stiles asked her to hit him.. For a moment, he was a bit surprised—he thought people only fell asleep like that in movies: talking amiably and smiling one moment, then flopped back and fast asleep the next. After a moment of checking to see if she was asleep, he packed everything into the Life box (including the cards), and draped her blanket all the way over her.

His movements were almost automatic: make sure Lydia is comfortable, tuck her in, place her glass of water within arms length, and leave without making a loud noise. Even while she was dating Jackson, and before she knew he existed in high school, he was always by her side when she needed help, and ready to aid her.

A few moments later, he went into a state of complete mental panic upon the realization that her stay was semi-permanent, and his sorry excuse for an apartment was a complete wreck.

Immediately, he went into a state of mental-shutdown, and scrambled around the kitchen to find cleaning tools. Usually, Allison did this sort of thing for him—she could never stand to see the messy state it was perpetually in—and absently cleaned while he talked about his problems. He never quite paid attention to how she could make it clean _and _pretty—he'd always assumed that you had to pick one.

Desperately, he grabbed a cookbook in one hand, and a feather duster in the other, not sure why he owned these objects because he neither cooked nor dusted. He quickly dusted off a countertop, mostly spotless due to his misuse of the kitchen, and elegantly styled the book on the counter. He then proceeded to clean up around the microwave, and moved onto wiping down all the glass and mirrors in the house with Windex, and plucked his pair of boxers from the heating vent. He made a quick note to either figure out how to use the dryer, or find a better place to dry his clothes than a heating machine.

When he made his way to the bathroom, he cringed, and grabbed a weird mop that he had bought from a commercial when he and Scott were hopelessly drunk off of spiked jello. It was some kind of "Swift Sweeper" or whatever the hell the weird company named it, but it had a long pole and some kind of pad at the bottom, and he settled for trying to mop the bathtub without actually touching anything. So far, it wasn't worth it, and he was starting to realize that to Lydia's nose, his bathroom might not be the most pleasant-smelling thing.

"Ew ew ew," He dryly gagged as he mopped away lint from around the toilet, and then stabbed around in the bowl with the toilet thing, making a quick mental note to look up proper terminology of common household supplies.

The entire endeavor of Stiles' frantic attempt at making his home livable was much louder than he thought a regular 'bout of cleaning should be, but after a moment's thought, he chalked it up to the fact that he had no clue how the hell he was supposed to clean things. His panic sent his brain into a kind of autopilot, and when Lydia appeared at the door a bit later, he was frantically using the weird mop to clean a vase he had bought at a garage sale.

"Are you, um, having a nice time there?" Lydia's eyebrows quirked up at the sight of the grown man looking like he was having a one-sided fight with a glass vase (and losing), and her lips curved into a smile.

Stiles jumped, and plunged the mop to the point where the vase shattered on the ground, "I, ugh, oops." He ran a hand through his hair, infinitely grateful that it was no longer buzzed, and he could actually use it when his hands had nothing to do.

Lydia's smirk didn't drop, and she turned towards the kitchen, "Do you have a dust pan?"

"For?"

"You knocked a glass vase over. Are you planning on leaving that there?" After a moment's pause, she slightly mimed sweeping glass shards into a bin with her hands, and Stiles jumped up, as if just now understanding what she meant..

"No! No, no, I'm a very clean person. I have one of those." He exited towards the kitchen, and Lydia bit back a grin as she leant against the wall. Again, she thought of Jackson, but it was becoming somewhat a mental loop: talk to Stiles, think of Jackson, talk to Stiles, think of Jackson. It was infuriating—she had no desire whatsoever to become one of the stupid, brainless girls who did nothing but think of their boyfriends.

Lydia groaned, and ran her hands through her sleep-mussed hair. "God, stupid, stupid, cheating...floozy." Another sound of annoyance left her lips, and she ignored Stiles as he swept up the shards of broken glass (with his hands and a paper box).

"Floozy?" Stiles questioned, but Lydia buried her face into her hands as an answer and cringed at the teenage girl, cliche-ness of the situation.

"God, I could become a shitty screenwriter," Lydia was sure that her brain would criticize her for such bleak language when she was running on more than three hours of sleep, "A college girl with the perfect boyfriend cheats on said boyfriend with...a childhood friend. Oh, and marries him, if that wasn't enough!"

"Maybe Jackson should write a screenplay on how to be a _perfect boyfriend_. Step one, kick your girlfriend out of your house. Step two, be a jerk who—"

"Stiles, not now." Even in her current state, she couldn't help but hear the jealousy in his voice, a kind of bitterness loosely concealed by layers of sarcasm.

"Lydia, you're better than Jack—"

"I said, not now, Stiles." An annoying voice told Lydia that it was her first marital argument, and she told the voice to shove it's head up its ass. Then, the voice of reason told Lydia and her vulgar language to _get the hell to sleep_, and she slumped against the walls. "Maybe later."

"Yeah?" And damn, the hope in Stiles' voice was painful to hear, and her gut twisted uncomfortably. She couldn't pinpoint the feeling exactly, and let herself slide to the floor.

For the first time, she noticed that her usually striking hair was in tangles, she probably had bags underneath her eyes, and her face was clear from makeup. She felt slightly self-conscious, and hung her head in a way that let the shadows bathe her face.

"I know Jackson isn't perfect. But I'm not either, so that makes him perfect for me." Lydia's voice was so, so weak in that moment, and she hated herself for how vulnerable it sounded. She didn't know who she was trying to persuade, but there was a note of persuasion in her voice rather than the clear, confident tone she would use when stating a fact like "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," and without another word, she blankly let herself go back to her bed.

As she slid back into Stiles'—or, _her_—bed and fell asleep, the last thought that touched her conscious disturbed her more than it should have:

_Maybe...maybe I'm trying to persuade myself._

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><p><strong>AN: **i'm sorry x20 that i never got around to updating this, i'm just a piece of poop and ugh, i don't really have an excuse. this chapter was a bit of fluff and a bit of a filler (heh double f's (like my grades)), but i wanted to post something in between this and what goes down next chapter. small spoiler: it involves an angry arrow-wielding allison argent (stop me with the alliteration please)

another note: i'm keeping this all human! it was my original intentions, and i'm glad the majority of my reviewers agreed that it should remain all human.

all right, i'm out to write some more, and drop a review in the box below if you have the time!


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